One might take Blanchot to be an altogether calmer writer than Bataille; after all, he has at his disposal a pellucidly readable style - his essays are written in the serenest French. But his fiction - and in particular, his récits - places the same clear style at the service of the most opaque of thoughts.
Who has not had the experience, reading of him, of being unable to discern what is happening in the events he reports, and especially in the second half of some of his récits, where everything becomes unclear: who is speaking?, what is happening? Still, although most of the récits are written in the first person, and it is tempting to reflect on their autobiographical origins, it may seem that Blanchot holds us apart from his life; that his fictions are like the multiple rooms the narrator of Death Sentence rents at the same time.
Rooms, spaces that must be left to cultivate an absence undisturbed even by him, the narrator - he likes to muse upon the absence in those rooms he has rented, and does not like to receive visitors in order to preserve what he can of absence in the apartment in which he is currently domiciled. Absence - now conceived as it pushes itself into experience, as it asks to be experienced as the most vehement of presents.
Blanchot's narrators will call it cold, vast - the rooms and his corridors in his fiction seem to expand to encompass the whole universe; how is it possible even to cross such a room? how many steps will it take? But each step, too, is a step not beyond - it is the absence of movement, its paralysis, an arrest that also fascinates Blanchot and that he will let his narrators present as a dying without term.
Where is Blanchot in all of this? Is he the narrating 'I'? Is he the one who speaks, or looks to discover himself speaking - or, beyond that, to listen to the other side of language as it speaks - the 'it speaks' that resounds, murmuring beyond anything you or I might say. I refer to that thickness of literary language which he often evokes - a kind of density that removes, in fiction what an author had intended to write. A literary remove - the space of literature as it simultaneously expels the author and solicits him, asking for books to write themselves from his pen, even as it burns blackly beyond him as the work, unseizable and, in its distance, free.
Let me say too quickly that it is this same distance that absents Blanchot's récits, that seems to void them, denucleating them, drawing their reader to that point that seems to maintain itself at its distance. And that it must absent them for him, too, according to his own literary criticism - that Blanchot is certainly the author who completes his books, has them published, and refuses to publicise them in interviews, or appear in public, but that he is also the adventurer who is lost in the detour of his fiction - of a kind of literary desert, far greater than the Biblical one, that aches, vast and absent, on every page of his work.
And now imagine Blanchot, like the narrator of Death Sentence, revelling in the absenting of himself he accomplished in his fictions. Imagine him, writing another one - one more récit - and happy in that absence he has already effected, in those books that bear his name but that also tear it apart.
Who is he, the writer? Not the author who lives in the world, in an apartment in a prestigious suburb of Paris. Not the one only a few friends saw, who lived surrounded by photographs of friends, it is said, and who was gradually losing his ability to hold a pen. Blanchot the writer lives in that absence that burns in his books and comes to us in that suspension when our reading asks in vain for linear continuity, and his récits seem to fall back into a language that absents itself from all reference to the world.
From all reference - and yet, and yet ... The narrator of Death Sentence says little of the events of the war. That's not what concerns him, he says. Tiny, seemingly insignificant events impose themselves on the second part of his narrative. The first is almost a well-rounded tale; it bears upon an event that barely seems to complete itself; the death of J., the dying of J. And the second? Event links to event in an obscure, almost free-associational pattern. But there's an urgency to the telling, a sense of movement. Something important is being communicated. Something great significance asks to be said.
If it is to do so, it is by way of reference, of the measure of some literary verisimilitude; the world of Death Sentence, though removed from us in time and space, is still our world; we can make our way across the narrative, which is composed almost entirely of concrete events and only occasionally breaks into that strange abstraction that comprises the second half of the fictions that follow.
'Virgil, that's Broch', says Blanchot in his reading of The Death of Virgil. And who is the narrators of his fiction? Who writes his criticism? What speaks in his narrative? What rumbles there? The war? No - beyond the war. Beyond the world. Or an absence that devours it from within. A hovering, an incompletion - isn't it language, somehow, that is allowed to speak? Language, and so that what is told becomes an allegory of what cannot be told, or that speaks only indirectly?
There is nothing 'behind' the details of the narrative. A book proceeds. Characters, plot - there is still something of these in Death Sentence. And yet what, too, speaks by way of them? What seems to cloud the clarity of speech - what great opacity, what looming cloud that obscures the sun? Blanchot, that's Monsieur X. - that's all we learn of the narrator's name: X. - but as it marks what spot?
The work is freeing itself from the book. The work - the unseizable that draws after it all writers, all readers for whom literature vouchsafes itself in its remove. The work - and it burns beyond Death Sentence now. Burns - and after we put the book down, after we read the final sentence. It is over - but it is not over. There is something unreadable in reading, as Steve reflects. Books like Death Sentence (but are there many of those?) are still as though untouched by reading; they remain perpetually uninhabited - room-husks that ache with absence that is our own absence; mirrors in which we cannot see ourselves. 'Read me'. 'You will not read me'.